Year of the Bitter Asian Man

by Original Bitter Asian Men on October 17, 2008

Happy 2007, readers. It’s been a rather long time since I’ve updated, and I want to assure people once again that no, I am not dead. Dave is not dead either. In celebration of neither of us being dead, and to celebrate the new year (never mind that Chinese New Year hasn’t begun yet), I want to examine what lies ahead for BAM, both the people and the website itself.

Site Design. Let’s face it, the website is due for an overhaul. The pop-down menus don’t work anymore (for some reason), and IE complains anyway about ‘script that may be hazardous to your computer’ even when the only thing I use script for is to import the menu coding. I use Firefox personally, but you have to keep an eye out for compatibility. Anyway, the bottom line is, time allowing, I’ll be redoing the site design at some point in the near future.

Emails. I haven’t been answering them. I haven’t logged in to our g-mail account in what, a year now? Maybe more? I don’t even want to know how much spam is in there, not to mention hate mail. Sure, the hate mail is amusing for awhile, but when it all boils down to the same couple of points over and over again, it becomes tiresome to come up with a witty reply, or even to click the delete button. Nevertheless, I feel guilty in neglecting all the mail that’s been sent to us, especially from supporters. Therefore I am happy to announce that I will be building a robot to answer all future emails sent to us. It will use a basic set of instructions to automatically answer any future emails from readers.
In other words, I will continue to not answer the emails. I should probably take down the Contact Us link – we just don’t have time to deal with them anymore.

The Asian Man in 2007. Lost in the static from the Michael Richards n-word incident was another incident. On the Dec. 5th airing of The View, Rosie O’Donnell referred to the international attention Danny DeVito’s seemingly drunken appearance on The View was getting by saying something along the lines of “In China they’re probably going ching chong ching chong, Danny DeVito ching chong ching chong ching chong drunk, The View“. You can probably find it on Youtube if you look. Anyway, the incident didn’t get nearly as much press coverage as Michael Richards’ thing, despite instant condemnation from Asian Americans as well as a non-apology from Rosie (“I’m sorry for those people who felt hurt or were teased on the playground”, she said. I don’t even know what this really is supposed to mean, but the “I’m sorry if you were offended” apology almost always means “you must be too stupid/humorless/uncool to have found my joke funny” as a subtext.) Some have argued that that’s because saying ‘ching chong’ isn’t nearly as offensive as the n-word. Then again, how does one go about grading the severity of racial slurs? Is it how offended a person feels? Cause I’m pretty offended by Rosie’s ching chong, but it’s hard to imagine the average modern young black youth being offended by the n-word, considering how much it’s thrown around in rap and hiphop. (Sociologists call it “appropriation” – the use of a racial slur by a minority group to make it ‘their own’ and therefore take the sting out of its offensiveness. I guess that means Chinese rappers are going to have to call each other ching chong chinks.)And how can anybody really say whether ching chong or the n-word is more offensive?
Unless you get a bunch of half-black, half-Asians together, and ask them individually which racial slur would hurt them more, you can’t really tell the difference.Anyway the moral of the story is that Rosie O’Donnell is terrible, and I was actually quite delighted when Donald Trump ripped her a new one a few weeks later. Not that I have much love for Donald Trump, either, but he sure flung some good insults Rosie’s way.

Warning: The following paragraph contains spoilers for NBC’s Heroes. You may wish to stop reading this article if you are following the show but have not seen the middle of the first season yet.That’s not to say things were all bad for BAM recently. Let’s take NBC’s new TV series, Heroes. One of the main characters is Hiro Nakamura, a Japanese office worker played by an actor of actual Japanese descent for a change, Masi Oka. And whereas some of the other Heroes have lame abilities like the ability to paint the future, Hiro’s power is to manipulate time and space. He can slow time down, freeze it, travel back and forth through time – in other words, he’s broken.When Hiro From The Future shows up, he’s totally pimping with a black trench-coat, a soul patch, and a katana at his back, even though present day Hiro is a typical dorky Japanese office worker. Anyway I love Hiro and could spend an entire article extolling his virtues as finally a mostly-positive portrayal of an Asian male in media (his friend Ando, played by Korean-American James Kyson Lee, comes off pretty well too). Not even super-Hiro can get a white girlfriend, though. He came close, but then the writers killed her off real quickly, so as not to violate a Law of the Cosmos, apparently.So what can the Asian Man expect in 2007? Only time will tell. Happy New Year to our readers, and here’s to another year of bitter and not so bitter rants.